Ignoring my intital thoughts after reading you don't want to "Move it up" (I had to do this once to my dining room - snow for the ceiling which I raised two blocks up; and level over with grass above on the outside), you could always change the dirt to stone slabs and have a patio area up there on the outside?

Do you have anything important directly above it though?

Ignoring my intital thoughts after reading you don't want to "Move it up" (I had to do this once to my dining room - snow for the ceiling which I raised two blocks up; and level over with grass above on the outside), you could always change the dirt to stone slabs and have a patio area up there on the outside?

Depending on the landscape above, if its got nothing built on it, i'd make an artificial hill or raised area above it out of cobblestone, then use grass (or whatever the prevailing block above is) to blend it in to the landscape.

Not really sure what you're asking, but it looks like you have 1 block of space between the stone brick room and the dirt ceiling that you could fill in to make your roof out of whatever material you want.

Would you be able/willing to move the dirt down 1 level? An 8x8 is perfectly-sized to allow for 4 sets of 3x3 rings of stairs with intersecting centerline beams. if you place those in each corner, you have space for a centerline beam connecting each opposing pair of walls. Where those intersect could be a point of focus (skylight, lamp, contrasting decorative block, small chandelier or other hanging fixture, etc).

One interesting idea is to put glass in the center intersection of those beams that allows sunlight to land inside the storage area. The center blocks of the stair rings could be redstone lamps, and I believe if you put a piece of redstone dust on top of those and an inverted daylight sensor on top of the redstone you can have lights that turn on automatically when it gets dark enough (ie, night time or during a thunderstorm). Daylight sensors always sit in the lower half of the block space, however, so lowering the dirt would perhaps make it easier to hide away the skylight glass and daylight sensors in some sort of decorative build that doesn't interfere with their functions (and without having to occupy your space with a larger redstone circuit).